Brave New Wasteland
by Freaky Krazer
Summary: Years after the Great War came the genesis of the new apocalyptic world, and the unprecedented opening of Vault 101. Now comes the endeavor of an innocent child to save what ruined her family and domestic tranquility from the encroaching evils.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own the Fallout franchise or claim any canonical and/or other trademark items/characters of the franchise used in this story as my own with the exception of original characters present throughout the story. Since this is an alternate universe of the franchise, I may make mistakes (regardless if deliberate or not) in canonical and other factual statistics and dates. Thank you.

Chapter 1: The Vault

Nothing but pallid light illuminated the subterranean recesses of the Vault. It was pale and frigid, bringing in white incandescence to the cold inanimate machines controlling and the running the facility's conditions. Down the halls, the monotonous, banausic beeps of the machines could be heard echoing could be heard as the residents sleep soundly, in the company of their curious minds, dreaming of an idyllic scene, one which portrayed the antithesis to the harsh world above. Within their dreams, they painted a picture of a halcyon world, nuanced with colors and sanguine life. The color and vivacious illusions granted to them in slumber cried out for an escape from the omnipresent tedium and social humdrum ambient in their uneventful lives.

Given that their dreams take for granted the safety of their ideal home, the Vault residents could never realize the unparalleled perfection found in the Vault in comparison to the vindictive nature of the macabre Wasteland. It was so disparate to the reality yet quite appealing compared to the archaic, beguiling frequencies played many years prior. And yet, the limits and inanity of an indefinitely iterated lifestyle debilitated the controlled and perfect environment of the Vault, inevitably prompting ubiquitous dissatisfaction amongst the populace.

Nobody knows which mark on the calendar is the mark of the present. Nobody can enumerate the amount of calendars which have been thrown out since the inception of this enclosed, insipid society. Prosaic statistics and facts of time and history became of obsolete use long ago. History and aesthetics are abstruse in the Vault, becoming extinct amongst the wealth of knowledge being taught. Daily iterations of arithmetic and impractical yet ingenious calculations of extensive mathematics and eugenics still linger, however, along with other specialized occupations kept alive for practical purposes. As pragmatists, it was essential to the Vault residents to teach and learn the knowledge lucrative to the longevity of the Vault. Of course, that is in the uttermost importance. The Vault is theoretically indestructible and must last forever, for even the youngest of the residents known, "Everyone is born in the Vault, and dies in the Vault."

* * *

One early morning, a pregnant scientist sleeps rather unsuccessfully as an unexplained tumult in her body incessantly vexes her nerves. She is not at all worried that the vexations may be portentous contractions, seeing as how increasing transpirations of these contractions are not characteristic to a woman only 7 months far. The anxious woman began to perspire as her nerves are discomfited by the opacity of the darkness of her chamber. Restless and disconcerted, she rises from the comfort of her bed and paced nervously in the dark.

"Jesus what are you doing?!" her husband languorously exclaimed as her commotion woke him. The woman began to gasp for breath, her body weakening at the abrupt scarcity of air.

"I…" she uttered. Her strength waned exponentially as time elapsed. The austerity of the room unnerved her as she felt the darkness encroach her feeble body. "What…" her voice quavered as words choked her throat. The former anxiety unexpectedly evolved into a fit of suffocation and extreme perspiration.

"Darling, what's wrong?" her husband asked. His initial exasperation transformed into panicked concern as his wife's fit grew audibly disturbing. He reached for the light as her gasps and nervous pacing progressively perturbed him. The distressing situation made him apprehensive. He began to wonder if his wife is becoming violently ill from her pregnancy or something went wrong while they were blissfully asleep and somehow, debilitated the fetus. Her symptoms never occurred before and began to perplex and disquiet him. The husband's hands shook timorously for the light as his consciousness was lost in anxious, fretful thoughts. The light then illuminated his emaciated wife, who gawked horrified at the floor, appalled to see her water breaking.

"Oh my G-…!" Her husband could no longer articulate his concern. It was now happening. In this portentous hour at dawn, his child was about to be born. And yet his panic paralyzed his body, immobilizing all rational thinking and action. He could not move as his eyes were transfixed at his ill wife. "Somebody help!" he yelled. But the sound didn't go pass the metal walls of their solitary chamber. It merely echoed dissonantly in the ambient consternation.

"Andy," the woman mumbled fretfully. The predicament was undoubtedly alarming, but she remained objective and merely slightly dismayed.

"Ivvy stay where you are. I'm calling for help!" He instantly ran to the door, poking his head out into the corridor as he yelled with all his might and energy, mustering up a herculean storm of noise and panic. The obstreperous scene roused the entire dwelling, with each resident languidly curious of the tumult. Amidst all the confusion, residents adjacent to the room were stultified to see Andy Currie whimsically darting through the infrastructure, flagrantly seeking aid. Meanwhile, Dr. Ivvy Currie remained in her solitary and austere chamber as she stood, disquieted by the blood streaming down her legs. The warm, sanguinary tributaries collected on the floor subjacent to her emaciated body as they slowly drained the last of her strength. Immobile and perturbed, Ivy began to feel lost in her own woes and macabre predicament with only sporadic contractions to tug at her existence.

* * *

_1 year later…_

"Where is she?!" The flagrant complacency found in Andale Currie's voice made the imploration seem plaintive. His eyes never left his fellow conversationalist as he imperiously questioned for the truth.

"Andy, I swear…" The Overseer stuttered at the subjugated resident's impeccable aggression. With each second, he felt the need to admonish him, to remind the doctor under whose arbitration he is subject to. However, Andy's indignant countenance stifled him from rightful pontification. The Overseer was unexpectedly incapable of conjuring his sapient and stern objectivity. "Doctor… Andy…," he tried, but couldn't. The Overseer felt spontaneously empathetic to the irrational doctor. His disquiet desperation annihilated all the authoritative energy intrinsic to the self-righteous administrator.

"With all of this power, even with all this junk you call robots! You still couldn't decipher how in the hell she was able to leave?!" Andale's anger stifled the fluency in his articulation Its impending growth frightened him internally. This evident vehemence was unprecedented in all of the impassive doctor's life, whose stoicism characterized his own individuality in the eyes of others. Now with the Overseer perturbed by his paroxysm, the doctor began to grow unsettled and paranoid that his uncharacteristic anger would represent to be catabolic to his own consciousness. The tiny yet voracious fear caused him to perspire and his cheeks to conspicuously flush. The latent panic could no longer be repressed as the Overseer soon took notice of the disquieting change.

However, the Overseer's illogical yet inane fear of losing dominance only prompted further apprehension for his part. For some anomalous reason, he couldn't retrieve the monopoly over the unwarranted interrogation. The doctor's uncalled indictment of his surveillance's ineptitude and incompetence vexed him. The poor, once omniscient man couldn't discern the problem before him. How could he avoid or repudiate prosecution when the accusations as well as their grounds were unknown yet reasonable to him? The abrupt evanescence of his authority threw him even more out of place. One cannot be imperious when his subjects are no longer subjugated properly. Aside from that, he knew he couldn't be physically, emotionally, and psychologically pugnacious to the doctor. His stoicism and omniscience appealed to all of the Vault population. Moreover, the doctor is extremely sapient whilst being pragmatic, which complemented the doctor's already popular reputation. "No," he thought. It would be unwise to event try and suppress the Vault's impeccable white knight. They would crucify him for not attempting to fix the situation as the pretentiously knowledgeable and absolute Overseer.

"Andale," he finally uttered. He immediately tried to muster as much rationale to at least beleaguer the doctor in order to pacify the volatile situation. "Your wife left and it is indeed a mystery. Cameras were never built around the entrance of the Vault because it was theoretically impossible to breach it internally and externally. Knowing this, I ordered a complete and imperative search for her. Dr. Ivvy is nowhere in or near the vicinity of the compound Andale and we can't find evidence suggesting abduction or intrusion. She must have left. I'm sorry."

The doctor could no longer find solid ground for his solicitous anger, but he still obstinately yearned for a more insidious explanation to his wife's surreptitious and irrevocable departure. No, he wouldn't believe it. The plausibility of it all mocked him. Not even a conspiracy theory could serve him in his self-denial. Andale needed to believe she didn't leave on her own accord. He needed a reason to still believe that what caused this mystery wasn't part of the recent tumult and discord in their marriage. Neither did he want to believe that Ivvy's recent philanthropic yet rebellious desire to emancipate the Vault as well as the wasteland from the ubiquitous atrocities caused it. Poor Doctor Andale. He merely wanted to live a complacent and humble life with his wife as simple physicians with their infant daughter, and maybe hopefully, even more children, perhaps a son.

"I'm sorry," the Overseer whispered, interrupting the piteous doctor from his laments. Now the Overseer no longer felt fear, but the inconvenient onus of a lovelorn and lachrymose man. Seeing the opportunity, the Overseer slowly ambled away, to find solace from the piteous doctor.

The abject doctor nodded tersely in response as well as feigned compliance to the Overseer as well as to himself despite the latent and gnawing sense of denial. The absurdity yet plausibility of these recent transpirations stultified him, bringing in a chronic yet subtle feeling of encroachment. The doctor, with his reluctant epiphany, felt ill and forlorn. How could that bloody woman leave him? After everything… "How could she?!" he muttered under his breath.

The corridor was swept with a grave ambience of dejection. To the doctor, it suddenly became darker, as if realizing what it was like too stand in aurous and sanguine sunshine only to realize al this time that he lived amongst his callous shadow. Aside from the flow of lachrymose emotions present in his conscience, he felt humility and was onerously wrought with it. The final feeling of perfidy and marital treachery were the last and most painful ones. The two had established, what he thought, to be an unbreakable affinity standing as a transcending effigy of love. But his wife's actions contradicted them all, leaving him emotionally paralyzed and distraught. All that was left of his once faithful, loving wife was a plaintive note, imploring for his stray and refuting all hopes of having him follow her. It was written as a farewell rather than a proclamation of love. Her amiable words masking the bittersweet truth of her departure tantalized him, driving him mad with passion and disappointment.

"Dear Andy," it began. He could almost hear her sweet, tender voice uttering those two lovely words. "I am so sorry. I do not have much time to write this, so I must be brief." Ivvy's characteristic brevity in her eloquence always appealed to Andale for being so straight to the point. But now, he wished for the point to be prevaricated and adorned with doting, loving words. "I just want you to know that I love you with all my heart and soul. We may have been through tough times, but it made me love you all the more. I have never met anyone who is of your moral and intellectual caliber, but this is why I must leave you here to help humanity. I can't stand sitting here, pretending the horrors outside don't exist. You can call me a coward, but to me you always will be the best and most wonderful person. I'm sorry that I must abandon you and our child for my weak and shamelessly selfish reasons. I hope that with my future actions and possible success, you and our daughter could learn to forgive me. I don't blame you if you seek your happiness with someone else for I am too weak and foolish to be content with the one you gave me. I hope with all my heart and soul that we all will be reunited again, but this time, in the brighter future I wish to bring. I love you.

Yours truly,

Ivvy.

P.S: Tell Claire I am sorry for abandoning her and that I will always love her. I hope one day we may reconcile. For now, just let her know that I am with her, heart and soul."

The doctor read over the note with much melancholy. He proceeded to return to his lab, seeking a way, a solution from his problems while the baby slept hidden in his chamber, dreaming of her absent mother. Upon arriving in his laboratory, he logged onto his private terminal and searched his library of files. He clicked upon arrival to a subtly placed file called, "FEV experimentation." Andale clicked on it and deleted a subfile titled, "Claire."

The child woke upon hearing him while in her cradle. She shyly fluttered her eyes as she somnolently woke to see her father, bringing a smile upon her face.

"Your mother," he began, "wanted to call you Sybil, after a famous Ancient Greek oracle. But I felt it was too... I felt it would've doomed you somehow, as the immortal woman who aged to degradation." Andale peered closer at his daughter and tenderly caressed her smooth alabaster cheeks. "That is how your mother is sometimes. Persistent but it will doom her. Now that she's gone, maybe I should name you after her now? How do you like Sybil?"

The baby laughed at the jocularity of their conversation. She could not understand him and everything seemed frivolous. Nonetheless, she proceeded to love the man who doomed her to her fate as he began to unveil a syringe from his lab coat and pierced her tiny limb with the most dangerous fluid to ever exist in the irradiated Wasteland.

* * *

_9 years later..._

Sybil woke next to rotting cadaverous corpse in a sea of brown and gusts of putrid humdrums, shielding her indolent eyes from the harsh, radiant sun. She still wasn't used to natural sunlight. Afraid and disconsolate, she obstinately hugged her father's rotting flesh, clinging to his odious lab coat while closing her eyes, waiting for the nightmare to end. How did this come to be? How did the Vault expunge them, as if virile contaminants to their perfect environment? Sybil could only cower for the answer.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: There's a quote in this chapter which belongs to Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Chapter 2: Paradise Falls

Sybil walked and walked. Her skin burned with the ever-present touch of the sun, blazing and bright, an illusive phenomenon she never witnessed in all her 10 years in this post apocalyptic world. The tiny, emaciated girl had nothing but a rancid lab coat and dusty goggles to clothe herself from the callous and empty world of the Wasteland. For about nine days she had been barely ambling along, bathing under the harsh sun whilst living upon the shadows it cast on her. Now only the darkness could shelter her from the atrocities and ubiquitous malignancy transpiring all around her. Never had she expected to see the macabre reality from which her home, the Vault, was excluded. And yet she couldn't find the right emotion to trigger the appalling sense of disbelief and shock. She could only swim in the murky depths of apathy and self-denial, hoping for hope when there was clearly none.

After hours of traversing an endless sea of unsettling brown, she sat herself underneath the shade of a welcoming boulder, beckoning her to rest and shy away from the pernicious world and her deplorable situation. Abandoned by her mother and taken away from home by her deceased father, she had nowhere to go nor a life to live. All she had was the contents of her father's note encrypted into her convenient mechanism bracing her right wrist, like a manacle telling her all she needed. The map was a sea of a virtual expanse of green, vacant and yearning for more geographic discoveries. But Sybil did not feel the need to explore and sojourn for she had no strength nor the capacity to fill the emptiness of her PipBoy. The terse message written into it would suffice for now.

"Look for Pinkerton. Follow the river SE."

Sybil did not know who this stranger was neither did she understand his significance in the recent transpirations of her deplorable life. If her father trusted her to find him, then he must trust the man to care for her.

She looked around the vast horizon. If there was anything Sybil knew, she definitely did not comply to the directions. Despite a built-in compass, Sybil ran off in a frenzy upon the intrusion of hostile locals in her cave where her dead father was currently resting. The rest of the panic was blurred into an equivocal event she could hardly discern, becoming abstruse in her memory amidst its pain and suffering. Running and running, she wound up somewhere far north after weeks of mindless fleeing, encountering no settlements as of yet and surviving on her canteen filled with purified water. It wasn't until the depletion of food and water supplies did she recollect her rationale and initial destination. So far, Sybil had survived on irradiated water and rotting mole rat corpses. The lethal effects of radiation did not prompt a sense of fear or precaution despite the fact that her father warned her to watch the Geiger Counter on her PipBoy and to stay away upon its raucous ticking. Strangely enough however, Sybil remained unaffected. She would drink from nearby puddles and quench her thirst with only dirty water, but what was supposed to be radiation sickness from living off of irradiated organisms and water seemed to have nothing. Sybil began to worry, but a helpless child as she found that desperation surpassed that of paranoia and meticulous dieting. She needed to live.

Sybil continued on, grabbing one last bite of some mole rat meat she picked up from her last scavenging. Days before, she came across a derelict diner filled with boxes of preserved foods. She carried what she could in her father's hallow labcoat pockets, and she was pleased for it was definitely more scrumptuous than the rancid remains of Wateland delicacies. Her blistered feet followed ruined roads a little further southeast. She stuck to the dark abodes of shadows adjacent to proximitous boulders, rocks, and shriveled trees and bushes. Her day was mundane and uneventful. The blazing sun with the company of the cerulean sky became prosaic as she seemed to be going nowhere, with the road stretching as far as it could without ever changing the monotony of the horizon.

The exasperated, bored little girl began to enter into a deep reverie of her past, conjuring abstruse illusions of her life's events and woes. She began to recall a day in class when she was forced to reiterate the words on the chalkboard as a reading exercise. It was humiliating and tedious for she did not excell in eloquence and speech. Upon lamenting to her father, he had promised that she will soon like to read, but not with the "literary junk preserved in these mundane confines." It was then when he had opened the family safe and uncovered a dusty, archaic book. Of course, this was many years before and it was the inception of her days in literacy. Her father would habitually read to her passages of the cogent play, but as she had gotten older and he had gotten busier, those days of dictation ceased. Now she can no longer remember the book, the author, nor the main storyline. But she could muster up a line her father liked to repeat when describing the future her absent mother had visualized for them.

"O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!"

The deceased doctor would often repeat it when speaking of anything related to her mother and her philanthropic aspirations. But the world, in reality, seemed dissonant with optimism and futuristic idealism. The esoteric remedies needed by this decrepit world were long gone and so were the people from which the fruit of hope had grown. Now Sybil was on an endless and dangerous journey, enduring the detriments of the Wasteland, in hopes of maybe finding her mother and restoring balance to an acrimonious world. But as for now, she was living the antithesis of their dreams back in the confines of their stifling society in the Vault, where boredom led to idyllic scenes and wishful thinking.

When the sun was ready to set, the sky was bathed in a crimson light and clouds began to hug the expanse before her. Shadows began to encroach the rest of the land while Sybil hurried along, trying to find a safe and derelict sanctuary. However, time elapsed and the night arose but she couldn't find a suitable spot. Tenacious and determined, Sybil walked on and eventually, she was led to what seemed like forlorn settlement abundant with rusty cars and barricaded with all sorts of debris and ruined parts of a house. She went around its perimeter, looking for an entrance to the settlement and she eventually caught sight of a huge, tarnished billboard sign. "Paraidse Falls."

The settlement seemed inauspicious to her, but it was dark and she couldn't seem to compromise her safety for the demeanor of a few buildings. When she finally found what resembled an entry way, Sybil cautiously approached it, but her clandestine efforts were in vain. Upon reaching the small gate, she felt something hit her hard in the back and the lucidity of her consciousness slowly escaped her.

"Quick put the collar on the kid!" a voice called out in the darkness. Sybil was frightened but she didn't talk. Her neuroses seemed asleep as she was paralyzed and perplexed at what was transpiring. Within a second, she felt a cold metallic necklace wrap around her small neck. Terrified and bewildered, Sybil began to make a run for it, but a sudden jab at her arm prevented her from moving and constrained any movement. "Sorry kid, but you're staying with us." A few chuckles emanated near her as she closed her eyes, finding tears in her eyes where fear should have been.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

The World As I Knew Her

Ivy couldn't remember the last time she felt so sure and yet so horrifically repulsed with herself. It was as if the vindication she received from the ends of her means were meaningless and lost, like a pebble thrown hopelessly down an abyssal well. Its tiny edges falling down into oblivion as the jutting stones of the cylindrical abyss smashed it even further towards its fall. No one was to retrieve it. Nobody wanted to, and yet forces of nature, of stone, were more than willing to let it reach the nadirs of the irradiated earth. And in that eerie thought, she felt a vexing pang of guilt, regret, and remorse, but now with all things passed, she felt even more dignified. To achieve her goal, to attain truth and restore the once salient beauty of the world the earth once knew, she couldn't mollify her ethics and compromise the success of her endeavor. To save something, she deliberated, you need to sacrifice another. In her mind, what the world needed more than sacrifice, were the people who are _willing_ to make sacrifices, to deplore themselves, to fall, and to climb, and to once more leap down only to give way for the ascension of something greater, something more eternal than their ephemeral lives.

The assurance it gave her; the enthusiasm hope fueled into her, almost let her live complacently with her regrets. Yes they were regrets, and she carried them onerously, but they were mere reminders of the costs she was making. It didn't matter that they were now gone from her forever. What mattered was that they were the rudimentary aspects of her life: they made her. They indicated trials, contempt, her vanity, and her humanity, but they were no unstoppable force which demanded for her return. Their temptations were alluring, but not compelling. As far as Ivy knows, they were her identity and they were lost from her. Her own identity is lost from her.

Sometimes, Ivy would enter deep and haunting reveries, which beckoned her to return to the Vault and its confining world. But her mind would diffidently decline, and the only way she could have done this was to repress memories of her forgotten daughter, and the sadness which tinged the thought of her doting husband. Sometimes she would dream, amidst the howling winds of the Wasteland, and the lingering sounds of her past, idyllic dreams. They were quixotic reenactments of her romantic past with her husband, and sometimes serene and slow-moving pictures of her baby daughter. The aurous sun in those dreams perturbed her as she had never seen it until she had left her subterranean home. And yet, its blinding light fit perfectly in those made-up dreams of her daughter, of golden rays creeping into a window as she held a sleeping infant. Those dreams often tantalized her with frozen pictures of a warm family, happy and blissfully unaware so long as they were enveloped by the sun's golden incandescence. Ivy knew she did not deserve such. She had abandoned her family. So why is fate bestowing such beautiful and nostalgic dreams?

Other times, fate was harsh. Her mind would be plagued by dreams of the isolation she grew up with in the Vault. Since the days of her early school, her brilliance was mocked and her theories repudiated. Teachers castigated her, her friends ostracized her, and the Overseer tried obstinately to reform her. In their efforts, they transformed her into a cold-calculating scientist, never fulfilling her love for pre-war literature, which she stole from the Overseer's office frequently, and her dream of restoring the world as her dreams and books described them: an everlasting lush of life and green. Then her dreams would evolve into even more macabre accounts of her past: the murder of physician Jon Rigby and the subsequent hatred for all things suggesting an exodus. People in the Vault never remembered Rigby. They don't remember his death and what it stood for, and not even what he had done. Rigby pleaded with the Overseer to leave. He calculated and predicted its doom, with a faltering filter and unwavering encroachment of radiation. After much rejection, Rigby had confessed to Andale and Ivy his dreams of traveling to a city in the Wasteland, filled with people of erudition. They couldn't discern how Rigby had known of this city of science, of a city which floated upon the bay of a once great capital. They merely doubted him. Now after all those years, after the birth of her daughter, and imminent signs of doom, she left to pick up where he left off. Ivy will no longer forget Rigby's death and let it be in vain.

"What will you get from leaving?! It's preposterous Ivy! Please don't leave!" Andale's voice pleaded relentlessly. His eyes wept a thousand tears of please, but she merely turned the other cheek and gazed solemnly upon their daughter.

"I have to go Andy. We both have to. We can take her with us… It'll be better to leave now and save what we can than to sit here and wait for something to happen…" Her answer was cold and emotionless. Andy could trace no sympathy and he hated her for it. After moments of staring her down with lugubrious gazes and then with menacing glares, he scoffed and faced his back towards his wife. The frustrated doctor proceeded to their room and left his wife there, thinking she would follow, but he did not know that would be the last time he would talk to her. The last and final time he shared a moment with her, even after 9 years of waiting. In the end, only death awaited him, and now his wife resides in a floating, dilapidated city, thinking of how their reunion would be if there ever was one. Unbeknownst her, this man whom she loved so terribly was now gone, and all she has left in the world is an enslaved daughter, hoping that the one family she has left is still searching for her.

"Claire…" The word left her weary lips with an air of nostalgia and yet with disgust, disgust for herself. How could she have left her with no qualms? The thought plagued her indeed, but to Ivy it seems that days went on without full conscientious guilt, and its ominous memories never marred any part of her mind or matter. She regretted it and it ended there.

She looked around, her vicinity as bare as her heart, yet as ugly as her mind. It was filled with empty memories tenaciously lingering, just as her brain constantly inundates itself frequently with unwanted memories and nightmares. But what was tangible, the dilapidated metal and buildings; the howling breezes, the burnt dust; everything was barren. There was nothing new or fruitful to be left in this world, just as there are none in her heart. Anything palpable and good had abandoned Ivy. It was gone since her exodus from the Vault. It was gone since her severance of her family ties. It was and has been gone since Rigby died…

"You say something Red?" The raider's sardonic remark interrupted her train of thought to a crashing halt. In alleviating her pain, Ivy had entered into deep reverie, ignoring the presence of the few raiders who tortured and hurt her. They were subtly located between jutted rocks and vermillion-coated sand, fenced by dilapidated cars and buildings, mostly skeletons of what they used to be. The raider chewed violently on a wrinkly, old un-burnt cigarette while his wrinkly, old eyes glowered at her constrained body, chained down to the ground seeping in their past victims' blood. The raider was old, about 30. Most raiders abandon that lifestyle (or die) once they hit mid 20s. This renegade life of violent anarchism, rapine, massacres, and kidnapping could only be handled by the misguided impulsiveness of youth, and most of the time, they resent people outside their age group. They usually commit the murderous act of expulsion or the cruel indifference of abandonment. But not Sid. Sid was old and incompetent, but his younger peers somehow enjoy his sadistic presence. He took a special liking to Ivy, dubbing her Red after her conspicuously auburn hair. It was a color that fascinated his prurient mind, often exercising his fetishes upon her, raping her, while taking complete care of her hair. Ivy ardently hated Sid. She hated his unspeakable transgressions and especially his exploitation of her. When the other raiders wanted to kill her, he insisted on keeping her as a "pet" though she never understood why when they often encounter female wanderers. Ivy was 39, almost 40. Her beauty was already withering by the day, and her deplorable life worsened her physique. She realized months before that each day she aged and sullied, the closer they came to killing her.

Sid approached her, licking his chap lips and groping her face with his grimy, corpulent fingers. "What's the matter? Didn't get enough of me?"

Ivy kept staring at him, but Sid knew she wasn't even looking at him. Her eyes bore into his being and darted past into the horizon behind him, as if he wasn't there obstructing the view. Sid hated this habit of hers. Whether it was inadvertent or not, he didn't care. He just hated it. He'd rather her show contempt, it was a fetish of his to rape struggling and impetuous women, but lately Ivy seems to read him like a book and her eyes' indifference towards his presence annoyed him.

Aggravated, the bellicose raider slapped Ivy, with the palm of his hand biting at her skin like a venomous snake. Her head remained lowered, indignantly refusing to look up at him. Aggravated even more, he grabbed her chin and raised her eyes to meet his, but they never met him. Her gray, sullen eyes bore once more right through him, as if he wasn't there. Sid snarled and eventually left her alone, going off into the tents his fellow raiders fashioned. He left her out there, to be eaten by a rabid dog, mole rat, Yao Guai… he didn't care. He couldn't stand her apathy anymore. He _really_ had to kill her, but for the sake of his innate, disgusting pleasures, he spared her for one more day. Until he can find an adequate replacement, Ivy would have to remain the subject of his lascivious desires.

*

Eli was a peculiar raider. Considered 2nd in command in their 6-man group, the other raiders left him alone. At first his disquieting introversion and insolent silence towards his camaraderie disturbed them to the point that they wanted to kill him. It would've been so much easier to take his life and eradicate his disconcerting existence. However, many years before when Eli was a boy of 9 and recently christened as a raider after he killed one of his captors, another one in charge of the group furtively stole him to a secluded area and tried to execute him for revenge. The next morning, the raider's companions searched for him only to find his dismembered body scattered all over the ground and a little boy sitting in the garnet pool of his blood, eating his head.

No one bothered Eli afterward, neither did they notice that he wasn't even a cannibal and had been inclined to eat the carcasses that they find. Now, years afterward, Eli was now a man of 17, notorious amongst other raiders for his tendency to grab female wanderers, strip them of their clothes, and meticulously dismember them. Another raider found him drawing perfect lines across a captured woman's shaking body, her eyes drenched with an unexplained fear as she realizes she became the "plaything" of this boy's macabre desires. After he was done "blue-printing" them, he would take a rusty, dull saw and slowly cut through the skin with extreme dexterity and surgical precision, letting blood squirt out violently, the victim's body protesting against his whims. In one of his escapades, a fellow raider caught him performing sexual rites with a dismembered pelvis of one of his victims. This rumor is yet to be dignified.

When Eli saw Ivy, he couldn't be anymore repulsed with her age and impertinent attitude. He has never spoken a word to this hag of a woman, but immediately could read her thoughts just as he reads his victims' thoughts out of a sadistic habit. Eli saw within her a purpose, a frightening goal. He dared not touch her due to an unexplained fear of what might become of him. When he attempted unleashing his desires upon her (after much persuasion of Sid) he was appalled to find a horrendous scar across her belly, the mark of a difficult birth. He lost interest in her afterwards. He preferred his victims unscathed. Something about her made him feel extremely weak, almost human-like, a pang he never experienced before. Ivy's arrogant and yet somehow overpowering countenance induced a feeling of discord and frightening contempt towards him. If he hadn't been sick and twisted monster, he would've acted in deference towards her, worshipping the very ground she walked and toiled for within her lay humanity as he has never seen in the Wasteland. Eli feared her for this. He felt queasy, his skin dangerously paling at the thought of even harming her. Something about her repelled his existence, debilitating it to point of revealing his true nature: a coward, a charlatan, and a little, helpless boy. Eli wanted her gone.

"We should sell her to some Slavers… It'll do us good than keeping her alive and having to give her some of our food."

The other raiders looked at him inquiringly, puzzled by his peculiar behavior. To them, Eli was the quintessential introvert, never uttering more than what he needed to utter, answering questions in less than 2 syllables. Sid immediately cast a Vulcan glare, his eyes piercing with the scorching tips of vermillion flames, their intensity silently erupting with displeasure. Yet his face remained frowning, understating the level of his annoyance. His mouth grumbled in unintelligible words.

"Why the fuck should we? We don't even fuckin' need the caps…"

The rest of the group sat in consternation, uncharacteristic of the infamous belligerent anarchists. They sat waiting for a vulgar rebuttal from either of their most feared members. It would've been easy to say that they had no leader. Raiders did not follow. They wrought chaos, but Eli and Sid were anomalies in their strange world of impulses. Beneath their brusque and irascible countenances, they were socially perturbing and their eccentricities emanated with foreboding signs of danger. They merely stayed with them because they were afraid of them.

After much silence, Eli looked up to his peers, his eyes a dark pool of ravenous black, waiting to drown anyone lost in his pernicious gaze. "We don't need an ugly, old hag sucking your dick for our food either…" His whisper came soft yet ascended in a petrifying crescendo. Everyone suddenly huddled closer to the comfort of the cackling flame, its scarlet rays casting mocking shadows upon their frightened faces. "Now Imma' go to Paradise Falls tomorrow with that hag and I'm sellin' her."

Sid shot up in indignant silence, his eyes glowering even more towards the younger man. From where he stood across the fire, Sid resembled an obscenely grotesque tower. His shaved head, pierced face, and inked body all formed an diabolical face whose eyes burned with the force of the infernos of hell. "If you start thinkin' you own this god damn place and that you own any god damn one of us, I'm gonna fuckin' bleed your guts out until you scream just like your little toys… begging to be killed."

All was quiet afterwards, with nothing but the eerie vibrations of contempt and acrimony pervading the atmosphere. Eli took one last bite at his roasted dog, and deftly threw it into the fire, his hands barely moving with sound or effort. But his eyes were fixated upon the imposing Sid, his standing figure appearing stalwart to their sitting faces. Eli, however, was not afraid. In fact he had plans. Moments later, everyone retired to their "beds" of metal and soiled cloth, relieved that the friction during their dinner was over and forgotten.

The next morning, the raiders caught Eli already on his way to Paradise Falls with Ivy chained as he dragged her down the road. Near the fire lay a mutilated Sid. His corpse hung by the feet above the fire place where Eli fashioned a pole tall enough to hold Sid roasting above the flames. The raiders merely looked in complacent fear and moved on to follow Eli.

*

Sybil looked on indifferently as she watched the Slavers crowd over an adolescent girl, maybe of 14 or 12 no one knew. She lay naked, her body forming supple breasts and slight curves upon her waste. All the slavers, with their libidinous eyes fixated upon their victim, took their turns with her body, deciding that she would be the subject of their warped affections. The other children refused to watch and merely gazed at the rusted walls of their cages, their hands digging vigorously at their ears to block the disquieting sound of the girls' unheard screams. They wanted to ignore what their fate could've been had things been different. They wanted to hope that somehow they will return where they were, into a world they once knew.

"What's wrong with this one?" said the guards who refrained from their grisly festivities. He looked curiously at Sybil who watched the atrocious scene, not with fascination or anger, but with an insolent apathy. It was as if the girl being raped did not exist and her screams did not pierce the ambience of the dilapidated fortress. Sybil's transparent gaze brought an encroaching discomfiture into his heart. He was suddenly afraid of her, afraid that if he hurt her, something horrendous would creep into his life to haunt him forever. She was very strange.

Suddenly, Sybil averted her eyes towards the towering guard, now exchanging the inquisitive glance. "What's wrong with you?"

The guard wanted to slap her for such a brazen remark, but he decided it wasn't worth unlocking the cage to do the deed. She was an impudent child, awaiting her doom. That was all. But she did not stop at that. Sybil cocked her head at the guard's diffidence, reading his thought and his reluctance to enforce authority upon her.

"You watch on… You watch them do what they do, but you do not follow. You stand here, content watching over us, ignoring your latent impulses.

The guard kept an impassive pretense, but Sybil inevitably discerned the trepidation which rocked his body, the fear she had instilled in him. He felt himself drowning in her voracious words, their syllables drenching his ears with torture and evil. He couldn't keep still and conspicuously shook. He ran on to the distance, away from the horrid girl.

The guard stopped by the entrance where he caught a young raider dragging by chain an emaciated woman with auburn hair, her face streaked with brown irradiated dust, and her sullen eyes imploring for liberation. The guard could not understand the connection between the girl and this new woman. He did not want to know. All he could understand was that he was afraid of both of them. He did not understand why the other Slavers couldn't feel it, when they were emanating with something evil, something born from a world different than theirs.


End file.
